‘Now and England’: Britten's Gloriana and the ‘New Elizabethans’

Abstract

During the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, Elizabethan culture was insistently invoked as a source of solidarity and renewal. Through the trope of ‘New Elizabethanism’ members of the press and public reimagined Britain's future on the foundations of a most productive period in its past. This article traces forms of ‘New Elizabethanism’ and other complex negotiations between modernity and the past in the music presented for the Coronation. Its central focus is the debate surrounding Britten's Gloriana, an opera based on the life of Elizabeth I, commissioned for the Coronation Gala by the Arts Council. The opera and the debate it inspired reveal both the stakes placed in the Elizabethan period and a marked anxiety about the status of the past in the remaking of the present – an anxiety that arguably plagued the Coronation as a whole.